Winter Of His Content

Talk story of the writer's recollection of a memorable 1947 blizzard. The late-December blizzard of 1947, with a 26 1/2 inch snowfall that remains unsurpassed, even by last week's might storm, got its work done quickly, as I recall, and perhaps with more effect. My office closed down just after lunch that Friday, and I walked to the subway through movielike handfuls of flying flakes. The next day...showed a city stopped not just in its tracks but in midstride. On upper Broadway, buses and laundry trucks and cabs stood at odd angles to one another in the avenue, abandoned in midstream and then wind-smoothed into white monuments that stood about meaningfully in the dazzling low sunlight. Television's weather-persons and moving radar projections had not yet come along, and natural events like this unexpected Washington Heights tableau still held a kick. The blizzard also felt like an adventure because my wife and I were expecting the birth of our first child at any moment. When I got home from my office, we realized that the trip to the hospital, if it came that night, would be by subway. Only then, I think, did I bring up the subject of our tennis tickets--following it with the brilliant reminder that Madison Square Garden, where Jack Kramer would take on Bobby Riggs that very evening, was actually closer to our hospital than we were, stuck way uptown, at home. And so we went, bundled to the eyes and trudging carefully but cheerily along, through drifts and down and up flights of stairs, holding on to each other and to the pleasure of our crazy outing... The Garden--the smoky, intimate old Garden, on Fiftieth and Eighth--was jam-packed, to everybody's self-congratulatory amazement... The baby, a thoughtful daughter, didn't turn up for ten days. What I felt during last week's storm and afterward is exactly what I felt during that long-ago day, in the blizzard and in the swaying subway and at the Garden, and through the next day, as well: I simply felt good.